The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs. Each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs.
In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometric size (such as the smallest component (or line) that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. This scaling-down process generally provides benefits by increasing production efficiency and lowering associated costs.
However, since the feature sizes continue to decrease, fabrication processes continue to become more difficult to perform. Therefore, it is a challenge to form reliable semiconductor devices at smaller and smaller sizes.